Four Amazing Frootlicious Teas I received as a Gift Four Amazing Frootlicious Teas I received as a Gift By Megan Cutler | September 28, 2020 | Comments 1 comment For my birthday, my mother-in-law (who knows about my tea obsession) bought me a pack of four ‘frootlicious’ teas from DavidsTea. I suspect the main reason she chose that one was because it came with a blue perfect spoon (blue is my favorite color). But also because we have something of an inside joke when it comes to the word ‘froot.’ But the most important thing is it meant I got to try four new teas. Which also means I get to share a fresh batch of tea notes today! I used to have pretty strong feelings about which teas should be drunk hot and which should be drunk cold. Which meant that I pretty much only ever drank generic black tea with lemon as my iced tea. But since I started collecting loose leafs from DavidsTea, and acquired one of their cold steeping mugs, I’ve been experimenting a lot more with cold teas. The teas that seem to chill the best are fruit teas – which this Frootlicious pack features. So I decided to try each of today’s teas both hot and cold before making notes on them! Grapefully Yours I approached this tea with caution – I have mixed feelings about grapefruit. When I was a kid, my grandfather used to eat half a grapefruit every morning as his breakfast. He would sprinkle a spoonful of sugar across the top and that made this sour fruit infinitely more palatable to me. I have a certain fondness for grapefruit in that regard. But grapefruit juice has never been much my thing. Thankfully, this tea surprised me. First, it smells like bubblegum – and you really can’t go wrong with something that reminds you of those old bubblegum packs you loved as a kid. This tea features apple, raisins, hibiscus, grape seeds, blackcurrants and blue butterfly pea blossoms (which ad an interesting level we’ll return to later). Overall this produces a subtle fruity flavor. I’ll admit, I wasn’t overly impressed with this tea hot. It’s mostly floral with a hint of tart at the end of the sip. But if you brew it cold and add a little bit of sugar, the citrus comes out a bit more. The flavor is still subtle, but it does have a nice, refreshing summer feel to it. Probably the coolest thing about this tea is that it brews a dark blue / purple color, but turns pink if you add lemon! Tropical Tango I love fruit punch. When my husband started making cocktails, I almost always requested drinks that were a mix of my favorite fruit flavors. So I expected to really like this tea. There’s no magical color change trick here, sadly. The tea brews a brilliant red – and stays that color. The ingredients include apple, candied papaya, candied mango, hibiscus, beetroot (probably where the red comes from) and coconut. The first thing I noticed about this tea is that you can taste the papaya when you drink it hot. Papaya isn’t a flavor that jells with me personally, so I worried I wouldn’t end up liking this tea after all. Luckily, the papaya isn’t the star of the show and didn’t overwhelm my palette, so I ended up being fine with it. This tea is fruity and tangy both when it’s hot and when you chill it. You can control the level of tang by sweetening the tea – adding honey seemed to mellow it out a bit. The tang was more noticeable to me when it was cold, but I liked that. It meant the tea stood up to the ice I put in my glass without getting watered down. For the most part, this tea tastes like tropical punch. The coconut isn’t super noticeable, but I think it provides that tropical kick. Like the first tea on this list, it’s perfect for sipping on a hot afternoon. Cherry Berry Punch Cherry is one of my all-time favorite flavors. In fact, although I first started taking notes with the grapefruit tea, this was the first one I actually tried after opening the pack. It boasts a slightly smaller list of ingredients, including black tea, apple, hibiscus, candied pineapple raspberries and, of course, cherry flavoring. And it tastes pretty darn cherry-like for something that doesn’t actually have chunks of cheery in its ingredient list. This tea is exactly what you expect. Cherry is the star from start to finish. And while it has a nice tang to it, it doesn’t punch you in the face with it the way the name might suggest. The best thing about it is that it isn’t sour, unlike the sweet tart tea in the advent calendar. It’s balanced. It’s mellow. And, you guessed it, it’s great for summer afternoons. Also since we’ve been tracking color a lot on this post, it brews a bright maroon color. Caribbean Crush Full disclosure: I was familiar with this tea before I received this pack as a gift. Caribbean Crush is one of my all time favorite iced teas and we always keep a tin of it around. In fact, this was the tea that won me over to trying more different types of iced teas. The ingredients h ere include apple, pineapple, papaya, hibiscus and cranberries, with a few extra artificial flavors for good measure. (Strawberry, cream and red fruit specifically.) I love this tea cold. It’s sweet and fruity. It’s subtle and mellow. It mixes well with lemon or even lemonade. It brews a soft pink color and almost looks clear from certain angles. But it packs a lot of taste into every sip, which is one of the reasons I love it so much. I hadn’t ever tasted this tea hot until I received this pack though, so that was interesting! I almost feel like this tea is a little too tangy when it’s hot – drinking it cold mellows it out a lot. But even hot, it has that nice fruit punch sort of flavor that you look for in fruit blend teas. Bonus! Organic Choco Chaga Detox Tucked away in my tea Tardis (yes, I have an entire Tardis full of tea!) is a pack of four wellness tea samplers I haven’t gotten around to trying. I picked this one because it’s interesting. I didn’t try this one cold like the fruity teas, mostly because I don’t have enough to easily play around with it. The sample came with but two perfect spoons. But I’m honestly not sure it would work cold. This tea includes organic cocoa beans, black tea, cocoa husk, roasted chicory root, carob and chaga. Chaga is a mushroom. I can honestly say I haven’t ever had a tea that included mushroom in its ingredients list before. DavidsTea advertises this tea as ‘guilt free hot chocolate,’ because the tea is supposed to be healthy for you. It’s also supposed to be a ‘detoxifying’ tea, though I don’t really buy into those kinds of health fads. Even so, I can’t really drink regular hot chocolate anymore now that I’ve discovered I’m lactose intolerant, so I figured it was worth a go. This tea does taste like hot chocolate, for the most part. I’m not sure I agree with DavidsTea’s claim that you’ll never switch back after tasting it. But it’s certainly passable, especially if you can’t indulge in the real deal. I will say that before I added a scoop of honey and a dribble of oat milk to this one, I got a very distinctive mushroom aftertaste. That disappeared once the tea was sweetened, and the website does recommend drinking this tea with a splash of milk. But just be prepared if you taste it unadorned. It wasn’t a bad aftertaste, but it did make me say, ‘oh yeah, that’s made from mushrooms.’ Have you tried any interesting teas lately? Share in the comments! 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